Lutz Ellerbrock
In his first exhibition at Galerie Gabriele Rivet, Lutz Ellerbrock (b. 1965, lives and works in Cologne) displays drawings and paintings on paper as well as on large-format canvas. The invitation postcard with its highlighted exhibition title – "Küchen Schaben Wohnzimmer Kratzen" – represents the artist's numerous picture and word creations, overflowing imagination, and delight in confabulation. The bizarre plays an important role in his motivational cosmos: wordplay and verbalization of everyday observations are visualized in colorfully absurd situations. At the same time, Ellerbrock attains motifs through occasionally melancholy wit and is able to generate peculiar effects through direct visual transformation: "Heute im Geräteschuppen – Essen nur für Gummipuppen" (Today in the shed, only rubber dolls are fed).
Light-handedly juggling with the ambivalences of meanings, Ellerbrock composes en passant a visual carnival of ideas, occurrences, and recognitions, with amiably strange sketches against the banality of the everyday. Masterfully, he uncovers hidden psychic states of being by seeing beyond that which is absurd to familiar and trusted notions: So is the case in the motto of a pictured musician which is, "I am one of the ten angriest men in Rock n' Roll," the abounding self confidence of which already inscribes doubts thereof. It is not merely coincidence that organs, synthesizers, and guitars play a leading role in the artist's pictorial universe: Ellerbrock, who himself makes music, reflects on and understands the accompanying poses and clichés of the music world, and also their fascination.